Obesity weighs heavily on global health

PARIS - Nearly a third of adults and a quarter of children today are overweight, according to a report Thursday that said no country has turned the tide of obesity since 1980.Traditionally associated with an affluent lifestyle, the problem is expanding worldwide, with more than 62 percent of overweight people now in developing nations, said the report. There are some 2.1 billion overweight or obese people in the world today - up from 857 million 33 years earlier. Among the most striking statistics: more than half the population of Tonga is now classified as obese - a dangerous level of overweight - as are more than 50 percent of women in Kuwait, Libya, Qatar and Samoa. The United States also stands out with nearly 75 percent of men and 60 percent of women overweight or obese, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study published in The Lancet medical journal. ‘Obesity is an issue affecting people of all ages and incomes, everywhere,’ said Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, who helped collate the data for the period 1980 to 2013. ‘In the last three decades, not one country has achieved success in reducing obesity rates, and we expect obesity to rise steadily as incomes rise in low- and middle-income countries in particular, unless urgent steps are taken to address this public health crisis.’ One is considered overweight with a weight-to-height (BMI) ratio of 25 or over, and obese from 30 upward. A staggering 671 million people now fall within the obese category, said the study - 78 million of them in the United States, which accounts for five percent of the world’s population, but more than a tenth of its grossly overweight people. China and India, with much larger populations, trailed 2nd and 3rd in the top 10 obese countries with 46 million and 30 million people respectively, followed by Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, Germany, Pakistan and Indonesia.

This news was published in The Nation newspaper. Read complete newspaper of 30-May-2014 here.